San Mateo Daily News
Saturday Dec 1, 2007

Metaphorically speaking
Program lets incarcerated teens learn how to pen plays
By Melissa McRobbie / Daily News Staff Writer

About a decade ago, Robin Sohnen happened to be touring a juvenile detention facility in Los Angeles when she met Mario Rocha, a teenager behind bars for murder.

She can't remember exactly what brought her there, just that she was searching for something. She was 41, recently divorced and asking herself the question: "If I died today, would I really feel like I had contributed anything?"

The answer she kept coming up with was "no."

A nun ran a writing program at the detention facility, and Rocha was "kind of their star young man," Sohnen said. He was preparing to transfer to the state penitentiary system to begin a long sentence and had written a play titled "Beyond the Darkness" that was performed that day by the other youth offenders, Rocha said. A character in the play suffers a tragedy but pulls through, leaving gang life behind and enrolling in junior college.

Sohnen said she interpreted that as what Rocha's life could have been.

"In that moment, in that chapel with that play being performed by these kids detained .... my life just changed," Sohnen said.

Sohnen left the detention facility that day galvanized. She was determined to give a voice to young people like Rocha, who otherwise wouldn't have one. She just had to figure out how.

"The joke is that I started the agency with a belly full of anger and the Yellow Pages," Sohnen said.

Back in San Mateo County, the former theater actress managed to persuade the county to give her 10 students from community schools, which she says often serve youths on probation or who have been kicked out of continuation schools.

She worked with the students two weeks, having them write plays that were then read in a show at the College of San Mateo auditorium.

"That's still one of the best shows we've ever had to this day," Sohnen said.

Now, 10 years later, Rocha is out of prison and a movie about his life has won acclaim at film festivals throughout the world.

And Sohnen's program, spawned by the words Rocha wrote, is going strong. Under the name Each One Reach One, the nonprofit serves youths in juvenile detention facilities in San Mateo County and San Francisco.

The program these days has two primary components: The playwriting program and a tutoring/re-entry planning program called ADAPT, or A Dream and a Plan for Tomorrow.

In the two-week, intensive playwriting program, 10 participants each work one-on-one with mentors to craft a two-character, one-act play. The mentors are professional actors and playwrights who volunteer their time. Sohnen is emphatic about one rule: "Mentors do not write a word."

One more rule: The characters in the play can't be people. They can be anything else -- an animal, an inanimate object, or even an emotion.

Metaphors come in particularly handy with the youths the program targets, explains former volunteer mentor Kelvin Han Yee, an actor who now lives in Los Angeles.

"They don't like to talk about themselves," Yee said. "They don't like to talk about gangs, drugs, guns."

The problem, he said, is that's all they know. Metaphors, he said, let them express themselves without feeling as exposed.

"It's not a gun; it's a thunderbolt. It's not a gang, it's a storm brewing," Yee said. "When we give the kids metaphors and symbols, they're not afraid to talk about it."

Yee formed a particular bond with one teen, named Stephen, who later joined the Army and is now serving his second year in Iraq. He e-mailed Each One Reach One in April to try to get back in touch with Yee, who he said changed his life.

Stephen said in his e-mail that when he returned to San Mateo County he may want to help youths the way Yee had helped him. Yee has been in contact with Stephen and recently performed in a play that he dedicated to his former mentee.

Another former volunteer, Michael Tadina, tutored teens through Each One Reach One's ADAPT program while he was a student at Notre Dame de Namur University. He said that experience helped steer him into the nonprofit sector. He is now 25 and works as a volunteer coordinator for the San Carlos-based Youth and Family Enrichment Services.

Some teens put up their defenses until they realized he was there to help them, Tadina said. He won over one teen with a spoken word improvisation. "He didn't think I was as cool as I portrayed myself to be," Tadina said with a laugh.

Tadina said it was rewarding seeing the teens build their math, vocabulary and history knowledge week after week. The program, he said, gives the youths a way to say, "Hey, I'm smart. I'm smarter than most people think I am and I can prove it to you."

When the teens are released from detention, Each One Reach One refers them to a separate program that helps them find jobs and readjust to the outside world, Sohnen said.

Sohnen said she accepts that not every child who participates in the program will thrive afterward -- but that if even one youth is helped, it was worth it.

"When one is no longer enough, it's time to get out of the game," she said.


For more information or to volunteer, visit Each One Reach One's Web site at www.eoro.org.

E-mail Melissa McRobbie at mmcrobbie@dailynewsgroup.com.

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